Dowd: Cliff talk isn't edgy anymore

Published 8:15 pm, Saturday, December 15, 2012

It never comes, for instance, when you're sitting in front of a blank computer screen trying to think of a column.

But the end is nigh, according to ancient Mayans and Washington mandarins.

We have reached the quivering moment of truth that Jon Stewart calls "Cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust."

However the Mayan prediction and the fiscal cliff work out in the next few days, I hope we are talking about the end of talking about the end.

It's tedious to always be suspended in midair, like Wile E. Coyote or Thelma and Louise. The attempts by some to continually whirl the whole American population into a state of apocalyptic excitement are exhausting.

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We have enough real cliffhangers — Will Carrie and Brody descend into craziness together or go to a movie and chill, going zero dark flirty at "Zero Dark Thirty"? Will RGIII's knee buckle against Cleveland on Sunday? — without creating fake ones.

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Cliff dwellers in our society may think that facing the guillotine focuses the mind. But the cliff metaphor is so overused it makes me want to walk off one.

If your Christmas presents don't come from Amazon in time, you're going over the gift cliff. If your boyfriend bails, you're going over the romance cliff. If he comes back, you could be going over the marriage cliff.

Journalists now have to add an extra coup de grace ("Fiscal cliff crash") or double metaphor ("Clock is ticking for fiscal cliff") or raffish cartoons to juice things up. The new cover of The Economist features Uncle Sam, waving a Jack Daniel's bottle, with the Statue of Liberty, wearing cool shades and smoking a doobie, plunging into the Grand Canyon in a red, white and blue Thunderbird with the license plate "Debt 1."

There are cliffians, who predict dire consequences if a deal is not reached, and anti-cliffians. But no matter if you're into Keynes, Krugmania or Ayn Ryanism, looking at things as a cliff is not the most constructive way to live. It's sheer madness. Apocalypse is a very bad place in which to think clearly about anything.

There are people in both parties who have wanted to keep everything on a war footing for years, a Manichaean battle between good and evil, right and wrong. Every election brings more insanity, hyperbole and demagoguery.

But scaring people is generally not a good way to get people to understand things. It's like the color-coded warnings for terrorist attacks that lost all meaning amid the fearmongering.

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Especially in emergencies, grave crises like a nuclear threat or a terrorist attack, you need calm people who don't think the world is going to end.

The BBC examined the etymology of the phrase of the moment. The lexicographer Ben Zimmer discovered that an 1893 editorial in The Chicago Tribune warned: "The free silver shriekers are striving to tumble the United States over the same fiscal precipice."

Zimmer traced the first use of "fiscal cliff" to the property section of The New York Times in 1957, in an article about people overextending their finances to buy their first home. Ben Bernanke imprinted the term on the public consciousness last February, pointing ominously toward Jan. 1.

But Derek Thompson, the business editor at The Atlantic, told the BBC that if you had to go topographical, a slope or a hill was more accurate.

"You talk about a cliff, it's extremely sudden and the second you step off the edge you plunge to your death," he said, adding: "We're not going to fall off anything."

Language is important, he said, because it can provoke a panicky deal rather than a smart deal. He suggested that a more apt metaphor might be dieting after bingeing, as in "fiscal fast."

"There will be a short, sharp recession in early to middle of next year, which is more like falling on your face after fasting too vigorously, and then the economy is going to grow," he said.

The really bad news is that, even if we survive this abyss, there are more coming, with the debt ceiling cliff and the spending bill cliff dead ahead. Once you start with the cliffs, you can fall into cliffinity — with endless cliff riffs on the horizon.